Studying Your Users: Facebook’s Greatest Hits

Facebook 's massive psychological experiment involving almost 700,000 unwitting users has attracted plenty of attention and outrage, but it’s far from the only time the company has used it’s enormous data set to conduct social research. The company’s research team has access to a pool of information any academic would dream of, and it has taken full advantage of that, pumping out an impressive stream of research.

Here’s five pieces of research produced by the company that caught out eye – you can click through to see more on each report and look at the full studies.

Families on Facebook (2013)
“Using a wealth of anonymized, aggregated intra-family communication data, we also paint a detailed picture of what parents and their children talk about on Facebook. Consistent with offline research, we see mothers doling out affection and reminding their kids to call, and fathers talking about specific shared interests, such as sports and politics.”

The Spread of Emotion via Facebook (2012)
This one sounds similar to the study attracting all the attention today, but came out a couple of years ago. Does the tone of one user’s posts have an effect on the tone of that person’s friends? “When a Facebook user posts, the words they choose influence the words chosen later by their friends,” the researchers conclude. “This effect is consistent with prior research on emotional contagion, in that the friends of people who express emotional language end up expressing more same-valenced language as well”

Social Network Activity and Social Well-Being (2010)
How does use of Facebook relate to how you feel about your social ties? One finding: Increased consumption of content on the network correlates with an increased sense of loneliness. “People who feel a discrepancy between the social interactions they have and those that they desire tend to spend more time observing other people’s interactions,” the researchers wrote. “Whether the loneliness causes the clicking, or the clicking causes the loneliness is left to the future waves of this study.”

Structural Diversity in Social Contagion (2012)
After analyzing exactly how Facebook spread to hundreds of millions of users across the globe, researchers said their work “provides a high-resolution view of a massive social contagion process as it unfolded over time and suggests a rethinking of the underlying mechanics by which such processes operate.” One lesson of value to those in politics, health and marketing, the researchers said: “to convince individuals to change their behavior, it may be less important that they receive many endorsements than that they receive the message from multiple directions.”

A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization (2012)
A little over 60 million U.S. Facebook users who accessed the site on the day of congressional elections in 2010 were shown a message atop their news feed encouraging them to vote, including the profile pictures of some of their friends who had already clicked the “I Voted” button in the message. Smaller groups were either shown the message but without the pictures of their friends, or weren’t shown the message at all. “Our results suggest that the Facebook social message increased turnout directly by about 60,000 voters and indirectly through social contagion by another 280,000 voters, for a total of 340,000 additional votes. That represents about 0.14% of the voting age population.”